In recent years, the fantastic growth of the Internet and other computer networks has fueled an equally fantastic growth in the data accessible via these networks. One of the seminal modes for interacting with this data is through the use of hyperlinks within electronic documents.
More recently, there has been interest in hyperlinking documents to other documents based on the names of people in the documents. For example, to facilitate legal research, West Publishing Company of St. Paul, Minn. (doing business as Thomson West) provides thousands of electronic judicial opinions that hyperlink the names of attorneys and judges to their online biographical entries in the West Legal Directory, a proprietary directory of approximately 1,000,000 U.S. attorneys and 20,000 judges. These hyperlinks allow users accessing judicial opinions to quickly obtain contact and other specific information about lawyers and judges named in the opinions.
The hyperlinks in these judicial opinions are generated automatically, using a system that extracts first, middle, and last names; law firm name, city, and state; and court information from the text of the opinions and uses them as clues to determine whether to link the named attorneys and judges to their corresponding entries in the professional directory. See Christopher Dozier and Robert Haschart, “Automatic Extraction and Linking of Person Names in Legal Text” (Proceedings of RIAO 2000: Content Based Multimedia Information Access. Paris, France. pp. 1305-1321. Apr. 2000), which is incorporated herein by reference. An improvement to this system is described in Christopher Dozier, System, Methods And Software For Automatic Hyperlinking Of Persons' Names In Documents To Professional Directories, WO 2003/060767A3 Jul. 24, 2003.
The present inventors have recognized still additional need for improvement in these and other systems that generate automatic links.